Struck's AFR train-cult article (p. 1060)
What’s interesting to Hal Incandenza about his take on Struck, sometimes Pemulis, Evan Ingersoll, et al. is that congenital plagiarists put so much more work into camouflaging their plagiarism than it would take just to write up an assignment from conceptual scratch. It usually seems like plagiarists aren’t lazy so much as kind of navigationally insecure. They have trouble navigating without a detailed map’s assurance that somebody has been this way before them.
Context
Endnote 304 is Jim Struck at his TP on 11 Nov YDAU, laundering Geoffrey Day's drunken Wild Conceits essay into a term paper for Poutrincourt — and mid-note the POV flickers to Hal's private diagnosis of what plagiarism actually is. Writing becomes territory you can either navigate raw or traverse only behind a map someone else drew: the map/territory problem restated at the level of prose, inside the very note where Struck is tracing Day's map line by line.